This article is based on written responses from Vantage Vice President, Solutions and Delivery Melissa Gallo to questions from Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Going into 2027 planning, most of us are looking at more retail media network contracts than we can defend line by line. The instinct is to treat it as a keep-or-kill exercise. Eight networks, some number smaller than eight next year, and a conversation with procurement about which relationships can survive the trim.
Melissa Gallo thinks that framing misses where the money actually goes. She’s Vice President, Solutions and Delivery at Vantage, and before that she ran client success at CVS Media Exchange and revenue operations at Walmart Connect — two of the networks brands argue about funding. Her argument is that the cut almost never lands on the relationship. It lands somewhere quieter, and by the time anyone notices, the experimental work that was supposed to make next year better is gone. Worth saying plainly: Vantage sells retailers the software they run their networks on, so she has a commercial stake in some of this. A few of her answers push against that stake anyway.
Classify the Dollar, Not the Channel
The media-versus-trade question gets treated as a taxonomy problem, and it isn’t one. Where retail media sits decides who signs off, what it gets benchmarked against, and how fast it disappears in a bad quarter. Asked where it belongs, Gallo declined to answer at the channel level and went to the individual dollar instead. Some retailer agreements, she points out, do both jobs at once — and in those cases the trade and media components should be separated and valued on their own rather than hidden together in a single trade line.
“Media dollars should be held to media standards, including incrementality and return. Where a retailer’s offering is sufficiently sophisticated, it should also compete against other paid channels for investment. Where it is not, it should not receive the label—or the budget protection—of media merely because it is sold by a retail media network.”
That last clause is the useful one, and it cuts against the seller. A network calling its inventory media doesn’t make it media. The test is whether the offering can stand in a planning conversation next to paid social and CTV and hold its position on incrementality. If it can’t, it’s a trade negotiation wearing a media label, and it should be funded and judged as one. For a CMO, this is a short exercise with real consequences: take the retailer agreements you have, split the ones that serve two purposes, and see how much of what you’ve been calling working media survives the reclassification. The number is usually smaller than the deck says.
What Actually Gets Cut
Ask which networks lose funding and you get a story about performance. Gallo’s version is less tidy. Scale and shelf position protect a network’s revenue even when its reporting is bad, because a retailer that a brand has to be present in doesn’t need to win an argument about attribution.
“Strong relationships can compensate for weak technology and reporting—especially when a retailer is a ‘must buy’ for the supplier or brand. The budget may shrink, but it is unlikely to disappear. The more vulnerable spend is the test-and-learn budget: optional investments that are easier for a CMO to cut.”
So the real decision in front of a marketing leader isn’t which networks to keep. It’s which line inside each relationship absorbs the reduction. Trimming the test budget is the least painful option in November and the most expensive one eighteen months later, because the test budget is where next year’s evidence comes from — the holdout designs, the new formats, the first read on whether a network’s audiences do anything a lookalike couldn’t. If your 2027 plan protects the committed spend at every network and takes the whole cut out of experimentation, you’ve chosen to learn nothing new while continuing to pay full freight. Make that trade knowingly, or don’t make it.
What You Can Check Without the Network’s Help
Gallo’s answer on separating a healthy network from a struggling one skipped the product entirely and went to operations. Does planning connect to activation and measurement, or does it move through spreadsheets and handoffs? Is reporting deduplicated against the other channels in the plan? Two of her tells are things any CMO can verify in a week.
“Can your team access a dashboard or near-real-time reporting, or must you email a representative every time you need information? Self-service reporting is more than a convenience; it indicates how seriously the network has invested in its data infrastructure.”
She pairs that with a second signal that costs nothing to check: whether you’re re-explaining your business to a new account team every few quarters. Chronic turnover, in her reading, is an early warning that service quality is about to slip. Both tests are usable in a renewal conversation, and both are harder to stage than a quarterly business review. One more from the same list, which is really a question about whether the network is learning: are past results shaping your next plan, or does every advertiser get the same split across onsite and offsite? If the allocation you’re handed looks like the allocation your competitor is handed, the planning isn’t planning.
In-Store: A 2027 Test and a 2029 Line
Roughly 80% of US retail media spending sits with a retailer that has no stores — EMARKETER put Amazon’s share at 79.7% in 2025 — while total US retail media spending approaches $71 billion this year. Store-based retailers keep pointing at in-store media as the answer to that concentration. Gallo agrees the opportunity is real and is blunt about the timing.
“In 2027 I still see in-store as a test-and-learn budget line, rather than a scaled, repeatable media investment. By 2029, it is more likely to represent a meaningful part of the working media budget. That timeline is exactly why retailers need to act now: those that wait for the market to mature before building the foundation will already be behind.”
Two things follow for the buyer. First, the vocabulary isn’t settled. Adoption of the IAB in-store terms is, in her words, “not yet consistent,” and most networks still sell against their own definitions, partly because the inventory predates the framework. If a network quotes you an impression number in-store, ask what it counts before you compare it to anything. Second, closed-loop attribution in a store is a function of loyalty coverage. CVS could connect a purchase to an exposure inside a six-minute window because its loyalty program was strong enough to carry the link. A retailer with thin loyalty penetration or a lot of cash transactions can’t replicate that, whatever the screen vendor’s deck claims. Fund in-store as a test in 2027, price it like a test, and don’t let it be sold to you as scaled media before the inventory is standardized enough to plan against.
The question Gallo would put to all eight networks is the same one, and it’s about verification rather than promises: what have you materially improved in targeting, activation, and measurement in the past twelve months, and how can we independently confirm it produced incremental outcomes? A network that can’t answer specifically has told you something. And there’s one number she’d retire before the CEO sees it again — ROAS without incrementality, which she calls “flattering, dated, and often inflated by sales that would have happened anyway.” Replacing it is the cheapest change on this list. It’s also the one that makes every other decision in your 2027 plan easier to defend.